Editorial: Missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 and trust in pilots

Existing cell tower off of Milltown Road in Bridgewater near some power lines.

More than a Boeing 777 and 239 passengers and crew were lost when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on March 8.

People's unquestioning trust in airline pilots to always do the right thing, and their trust in modern technology to track down the hard-to-find, may do a quick fade as well.

Flight 370 was en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing when it dropped out of sight. No distress message was sent and little debris has been found, although it now appears that the plane went down in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean.

One theory that’s widely accepted is that the plane’s pilot or co-pilot, or both, shut off communications with the ground, veered the plane off its flight path and flew on for several hours.

The future could bring additional psychological profiling for airline pilots.

And what should we make of technology’s failure to find the missing plane? After all, we’re said to live in the Surveillance Age, when somebody somewhere knows where we are all the time.

There are some explanations — no cell towers in the Indian Ocean, for instance.
So we can't always depend on airline pilots to keep their passengers safe and on technology to be our eyes in the sky. With those cold truths, the ultimate result of the tragedy of Flight 370 could be deeper cynicism in an already cynical world.